Sameer 's Public Library

This was a great conversation on Google Plus I had with a number of smart folks on why Marketing STILL doesn't get social. And another example of a blog post where the comments are even better. Its a conversation I will keep pushing on. Feel free to chime in.

"According to Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, the site is increasingly becoming a peer-to-peer career-development network. In future, he predicts, members of LinkedIn doing similar sorts of work will "trade intelligence" about professional best practice with each other. "It will be a way to upgrade yourself constantly by trading intelligence, on, say, how to do my job as a product manager better."------------------------Interesting read. This future is already here for many of us. I'm blessed to be able to do this already in a number of "back channels" - A number of Enterprise thinkers and doers who are trusted friends that I converse with regularly, The Enterprise Irregulars, The Social CRM Accidental Community, and many more. It is the way of the future - a co-opetition model at the individual level, even if you work for a large organization. Sure it gets murky at times but net net, you're way more plugged in than you can every be. It will become increasingly apparent that you can't scale effectively if you only engage with neatly defined complementary networks.

Sanjay Poonen, President of Global Solutions at SAP helps us all out by showing the softer side of the tech industry. I get my downtime in the Kitchen but clearly he does on the Piano.In this fantastic performance on YouTube, Sanjay ties together the national anthems of a number of countries to show how SAP is focused on the increasingly intertwined Global Customer. I see it as representative of how many of us view our charter and even our cause as we work hard to make the world a better place via technology. I wish more of us showed our other side. Nicely done, Sanjay.

If you dont follow Hutch Carpenter on Twitter, you should (@bhc3). This is a really good synopsis of a BCG study that basically says that Innovation cant be limited to R&D groups, and that the financial analysis of those companies that spend more on Innovation doesn't correlate with better performance. I've written about this before and I generally agree: Those closer to customers and at the edges of our organizations are well suited to spotting new ideas that customers care about. Most organizations unnecessarily ring fence idea generation, the idea being that a few smarty pants in the org will have the best ideas. Most often, they just dont have a pulse on the changing needs of the prospect and customer and by the time they figure out they had it wrong, its too late to course correct. The reason being that they aren't wired to fail fast and move on, programmatically.

Prashanth Padmanabhan has a thought proviking post up on why there will never be one super [employee] profile in the enterprise. I understand his issues with this but I think its important to decouple sources of employee intelligence and the profile itself. I fully agree that we have to have systems engage and share data but still, as we start to understand the implicit and explicit elements of what makes a complete profile (i recently posted here on this topic), we need to start to bring the right information together in one place. I agree with Prashanth that we need to let employees maintain their profile but I think thats a rat hole for the most part. When is the last time you updated MyYahoo or Google profiles? As bad as HR might be at some orgs when it comes to updating employee data, employees might be no better.

We need implicit data to feed a profile to truly get a sense of what each employee brings to the table - based on not just what she thinks she knows, but her work and how the community feels about it. Great post by Prashanth.

"The person with the largest activity in the microblogging tool may not be the real expert you’re trying to find."-------------One of the big issues in enterprise social software deployments is participation and at a root cause level, participatory intent. Once we do infact start to pay attention to the context the exists inside other participants heads, inside our content bases and finally in our business process apps, were still going to have to do a good job of figuring out the input we ultimately rely on to make good business decisions - be those on customer intelligence, on a feature in a product roadmap, who to give a raise to, and some day, what markets to enter. I havent seen what spreadd is up to but I liked the focus they illustrate in this post and it tends to this coming problem once we begin to optimize the use of enterprise social concepts.

Some great comments by the likes of Adina Levin, Sig Rinde and Jon Reed (JonERP) on what mature incentive models need to look like to have staying power in the enterprise. We risk making some of the same tactical 'solution looking for a problem to solve' mistakes as we often make with enterprise social computing. See what some of my really smart industry colleagues have to say.

"Some of the fervor of the Social Media crowd sounds like it’s led by CRM Savonarola. And it sounds like old school these days to talk about antiquated interfaces and poor process design and inadequate knowledge management systems. Yet for the majority of organizations, there is still a lot of work to be done to engineer great customer experiences that involves the basics."

Michael Maoz is on point about fixing customer service first and objectively understating where social fits in the larger picture. i had my own experience with Dell and Microsoft on a similar topic (http://ow.ly/6SrLR) where basic CRM was broken and no amount of peppering social would make difference. This is a critical topic especially as the volume levels on social as a cure all for business continues to go up.

"What people failed to see regarding the Dell or Comcast success stories in the early social media days, is the amount of work that went on behind Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. The true transformation of these businesses what not in taking to social network, but instead building the back end to start fixing the problems that created negative experiences in the first place. In my list above, I mention the power of stories, and both Dell and Comcast utilized these online conversations or stories to help drive improvements. I am sure both companies will admit that this is an ongoing process and that wholesale change does take time."Frank Eliason nails it in a way that few can. Its shocking how many orgs try to front load 'social media' in the same way that they have front loaded marketing, sales and support for decades. IMO, the customer is systematically disinter-mediating your marketing department more and more every day. They get the basics from the social web, and then they want to talk to the experts we hide inside cubes, who designed and built those great products. To get those brains infront of customers and prospects, you need this back end that Frank describes. And that comes from a well managed engagement channel operation but also from linking the rest of your employee base. The tools exist; the mindset now needs to catch up.

"Some firms have found that the traditional once-a-year review is so flooded with information—appraising past performance, setting future goals, discussing pay—that workers have trouble absorbing it all, and instead dwell on criticism without really hearing constructive ways they can improve."As I wrote in my most recent post on "Assessing the real value of 'Me'", (http://ow.ly/6Eu5l), this is huge problem. This article touches on one issue. Mine is about the lop sided nature of structured performance http://ow.ly/6Eu5lreviews and how collaborative analytics can help provide insight based on the merits of an employees work. In this case, Rypple provides the needed in-the-flow metrics.

Great piece by +Keith Swenson on the coming mish-mash of public and private data.As I see it, we are going to need secure personal multi-tenancy systems as our hardware, software and storage usage in our personal and work lives start to converge. And its a completely new system that I dont think we've thought through yet. But to satisfy the needs of seamless information access and leverage, and privacy and regulatory needs of organizations we work for, compliance is going to need a overhaul. Im no expert on this topic but its going to take encryption, partition and other methods not just from a general purpose security provider but also be embedded inside apps so every element of stack plays nice.Confusing, even overwhelming but interesting times.....

Today, broadcast email is rated by resellers as the least effective marketing program provided by their vendors.

No wonder resellers don't like it much. Millions of emails are sent to channel partners every week with all sorts of important or mundane messages. How many actually make it through to the intended recipient? Unfortunately, the answer is very few. First, there is the issue of outdate email addresses when people change companies or accounts. Second, most experts say that up to 40% are blocked, most without bounce notifications being returned to the sender. Third, even if the message gets though the corporate filters, a large percentage then ends up in a desktop junk file, especially if it contains frequently blacklisted words like webinar or training. So when a vendor thinks it's sending emails to 20,000 channel partners, there is just no telling how many emails (if any) make it though the technical gauntlet and actually end up in front of an intended recipient. Probably very few.